PUP Day 14

Bakrid and Varalakshmi Puja on the same day, also a Friday!

Topics read today 

United States: Abolition by War, 1860-65

On the impossibility of Gradual Abolition and Compensation in the US

On the Proprietarian and Social Justification of Slavery

Reconstruction and the Birth of Social Nativism in the US

These sections have a brief but insightful look at the American Civil War. Interesting argument about how slavery guaranteed that slaves will be cared for in the old age while industrialists would simply discard workers once useless. Jefferson, Calhoun etc debating slavery. The gradual shift of Democratic party over the decades since the War. How segregation continued despite abolition. And the idea of "native" population to justify the inequality, while completely ignoring the massacre of the native Indians.

Next topics examined

Brazil: Imperial and Mixed-Race Abolition in 1888

Russia: The Abolition of Serfdom with a Weak State 1861

Brazil continued with deep divisions after the abolition though intermixing was very high from way back. They had insisted on educational qualification for suffrage. 

Russia didn't have a strong enough state under the Tsar to implement abolition effectively

Moved onto Chapter 7

Colonial Societies: Diversity and Domination

The Two Ages of European Colonialism

The 1500-1800 phase of violence, war, rampant exploitation

The 1800-1950 phase of milder subjugation by which time the justifications of the past 300 years where imbibed by the colonised as well. 

Settler Colonies and Colonies without Settlement

Case of Algeria and France

Slave and Colonial Societies: Extreme Inequality

Top decile captures 80-90% of the wealth and income. 

PUP Day 13

Learnt this sloka from Dr. Mahesh about the effect of Hathayoga

vapu krishatwam,

vadane prasannam

nada spudatwam

nayanesu nirmalam

arogatha

bindu jayam

agni deepanam

nadee vishudhir

hathayoga lakshanam

Did more reading on slave societies. The West Indies and Haiti in particular as case study. While moving from trifunctional to ownership society, compensation for slaves was never discussed, only slave owners were compensated. Haiti went onto pay till 1950 a debt to France. Now that US is repaying Japan but not Mexico or previous slaves, Germany and France to old Jewish property owners from WWII, the question is whether France needs to compensate Haiti. Just like the transformation of Sweden from extreme inegalitarian to socialist, Democratic party went from fighting for slave owners in the civil war to being the party of the New Deal, voting rights and finally Obama. The ideological changes and influence of events is fascinating. 

Will continue this chapter tomorrow and get to the colonial social structure in the next chapter.

Pup Day 12

Part 1 of the book completed today. Almost one fifth of the book. So this could finish up in 2 months. The reading has become faster and more interesting as the topic is gripping. The translation has preserved the momentum and excitement of the original research.

Learnt about the Swedish Quarternary society today: Nobility, Clergy, Bourgeoisie and Labor.
They had one of the oldest parliament, but proportional voting meant few had as much as 100 votes depending on their wealth and land ownership. This system stayed surprisingly for a long long period. The extreme inegalatarianism is unexpected from Sweden because we are familiar with its socialist democratic recent history. In one hundred years, Sweden went to being a welfare state. The SAP party ruled uninterrupted for almost a century. So such pivoting is possible. It is only a matter of dominant ideology and replacing the older justification for inequality.

Next Part of the book is about Slave and Colonial societies including India.
Slave societies are those with a sizeable percentage of population as slaves and Slave owning societies are those that had slaves but they made up only a small percentage of the population.

PUP Day 11

More on Ownership society transformation in England.
References to Jane Austen, the gentry and how wealth married into nobility. The aspirations and hobbies of those who could afford more than sustenance. Again, thought about Downtown Abbey.
Detailed history of collapse of House of Lords. The Black Act, the fencing, the Irish question etc.

Tomorrow will learn about Sweden and that brings the Part 1 of the book to an end. Second part is Slave and Colonial Societies that includes India.

PUP Day 10

Chapter 5
Ownership Societies: European Trajectories

Today was a slow reading day. Quite an interesting chapter looking at the transition of England into ownership society and then neo-proprietarianism. England had issues with clergy in the 1530s when Henry VIII took over monasteries because of his fight with the Pope. Clergy quickly lost their financial power in England compared to Spain where nearly 8% of the adult male population joined the clergy during 18th century.

England had the parliament but this again had the House of Lords holding complete sway of the nobility. Labor party comes much later in 20th century. Conservatives (Torys) and Whig Party have much older origins. Gentry and the neo-wealthy using marriages to move up the ladder was common. Next segment will examine these depictions in popular literature.

Downtown Abbey is still such a popular series. I had never looked at it from a sociological point of view. But I think the commoner aspiration towards royalty, like the princess dolls that girls play with, was neatly catered to in the TV series.

Tomorrow hopefully more time to read and reflect.

PUP Day 9

Chapter 4
The Case of France as an Ownership Society.

The rest of the chapter details the tax system that led to much more massive concentration of wealth in the 19th century. Finally Caillaux used data to explode the myth that France was a country of small holdings. Such a myth of an emancipated country of equality under property ownership was comfortable for the nation to believe in. Once data proved it was exact opposite, progressive tax was introduced.

The chapter ends by looking at Capitalism as the Proprietarianism for the Industrial Age. Capitalism codifies the material and immaterial property ownership. It leads to supranational entities. They are above national laws. Capitalism is a political ideology that provides absolute protection to private property. In literature, Emile Zola's Germinal reflects the impact of capitalism. Proprietarianism's end is seen in the disappearance of salons and elegant balls from the literature. Capitalism is more an urban phenomena. It's the new justification story for the inequality.

Next chapter looks at Sweden and Britain. 

Almost reading at the rate of 20 pages these days. The book might get over in two months at this rate. 

PUP Day 8

Chapter 3
Invention of Ownership Societies

Part 2

The chapter continues to talk about moderate versus extreme suggestions made before and after the revolution. The inequality that resulted after the revolution was justified by mostly touting the ending of serfdom and by the possibility of utter chaos if alternatives other than proprietariansim is considered.

Chapter 4
Ownership Societies: The case of France

This chapter presents inferences from the detailed property data available after the revolution. It shows inequality skyrocketing in the 19th century. In the Belle Epoque between 1880-1914, it was extremely high with top decile owning 80%. In Paris it was even more pronounced. For example, nobody owned a single apartment. People either owned an entire building or were simply renters for life. Huge chunk of the population died without having anything to pass on to the next generation. Progressive tax was discussed but never implemented. Sophisticated financial instruments like stocks and foreign investment became vehicles of preserving wealth and generating income. The inequality seemingly reduced from the Patrimonial Middle Class which rose with some mobility.
Literature especially Balzac paints vivid picture of the rise and fall of enterprising individuals and the obsession with money and property. The Ownership society was obviously inegalitarian.

From parallel reading of Seymour Papert, it is clear how the education system managed to sabotage the use of computers in the last 40 years to maintain the inequality and status quo. Byju's is cracking down on any criticism in the social media, giving a clear current example of how the wealthy and powerful will force their systems on the rest which will ensure that the inequality is preserved.

Tomorrow will finish this chapter and move onto the case study of England and Sweden as alternate trajectories into ownership society.

PUP Day 7

Chapter 3
The Invention of Ownership Societies

Part 1
Will take couple of days to finish this chapter. It's a brilliant analysis and summary of the French Revolution.
The subtopics were
The Great Demarcation of 1789 and the Invention of Modern Property: It narrates the switch from traditional trifunctional feudal society to property ownership society. All the powers move to the centralised state and all the ownership moves to individuals. Nobles manage to reclaim most of the property but the clergy suffers permanently.
Corvees, Banalites, Loyers: From Feudalism to Proprietarianism: Basically the kind of debt instruments that existed prior to the revolution. The ownership and monopoly of Mills, bridges, presses, ovens etc came under banalites. Led me to an interesting thought about evolution from fire to cooking to milling of grains to preprocessed food and the analogous development of the mind.

Lods and the superposition of perpetual rights under the ancien regime: This talks about the linguistic approach taken to legitimise the contracts that existed before the revolution. All the administrative and judicial powers were withdrawn from the nobles. Regards to property Kerala implemented all this after almost 200 years. Nice detour looking up about the Land Reform and the Education Bills of the first Kerala government by Gowri Amma and Mundassery ministries.

Can property be placed in a new footing without measuring its extent? : the section has an interesting note about previous attempts of progressive taxation. It was never considered during the revolution.
Knowledge, Power and Emancipation: The transformation of ternary societies:
The revolution did abolish serfdom, the laborers were free, the clergy lost considerable power and property. The state became the authority for justice, education, hospitals etc which it took over from the Church. Elites were left with enough chance of renewal.

Historical change stems from the interaction between, on one hand, the short term logic of political events and on the other hand the long term logic of political ideologies. Evolving ideas are nothing unless they lead to institutional experiments and practical demonstrations. ideas must find their application in the heat of events, in social struggles, insurrections and crises. Conversely, political actors caught up in the fast moving events often have no choice but to draw on a repertoire of political and economic ideologies elaborated from the past. t times they may be able to invent new tools on the spur of the moment, but to do so takes time and a capacity for experimentation that is generally lacking.

Montesque and other conservative philosophers feared despotic state which in present times is like the possibility of supranational powers.
France being a fairly large country, the revolution and subsequent wars had deep impact on surrounding states as well. 

PUP Day 6

Chapter 2
European Societies of Orders: Power and Property

A Balance of Powers?
Oratores, Bellatores, Laboratores!
Peasants severely punished for organising and assembling.
Trifunctional order and promotion of free labor. All labor categorised as one.
Is a new order transnational, urban-digital and rural?
Abbe Sieyes and French revolution. The Third Estate demanding 50% weightage of the vote.
Minuscule population proportion of the dominating classes. Under 10%. Further reduction as nobility promotes celibacy and prevents dilution. Primogeniture. Clergy drawn from nobility.
The massive resources with the Clergy and Nobility despite small size. Invention of the justification for inequality. Clergy handles record keeping, education, spiritual needs. Lot of internal division and diversity within nobility. Lack of census for reliable population data.
The demographic trajectory in France is similar to that in Kerala. From highly fractured and diverse landed nobles and fiefdom, there was the accumulation of power towards the royal household. Bigger empires in India as well. Centralised control. Then ripe for revolt. Marthanda Varma's genius of tying up the royalty with divinity.
The ascent of Roman Catholic Church in ownership from 4th century onward.
Nobility becomes the propertied class between French revolution and restoration and subsequently ownership society gets created. Extreme ownership of communism with govt owning 90% of the nation. Property owning organisation model refined through the history of the church. New debt instruments, techniques of managing, usury, interest rates, kind of investments that were allowed. The wealthy church vs the wealthy families.
Ecclesiastical Property as the basis of economic law and capitalism!!!!

PUP Day 5

Chapter 1
Ternary Societies: Trifunctional Inequality

Very powerful idea that large organised societies have always had the three divisions of clergy, military and commoner.
The proportion of population in the two dominating classes have been at times as low as 2%. In India, before the British, it was roughly 10% but if all the higher castes are included, rises to 20%. Spain had 11%.
It is amazing that this small minority dominated the vast majority. Birth, death, education, defence and policing were handled by the dominating ones. The inequality theory they proposed provided much needed security and meaning to the rest of the society. There was intermixing and the dominance had variation widely. In Catholicism the clergy couldn't reproduce so their ranks had to be filled from the other classes.
Each was convinced of their essential nature for the functioning of the society just like organs of the body. Manusmriti had them as head, arms and legs. The separator myths like Normans vs Saxons, Aryans vs Dravidians were created to justify the inequality. In Iran, the clergy has gone on to control the modern state as well.
Case studies for Part 1 will be France, contrasted with Britain and Sweden, India, contrasted with China and Japan and finally Iran.
The French revolution on Aug 4, 1789 clearly broke the Ancient Regime and substituted it with what became the ownership society. In the 20th century, ownership society underwent changes leading to the neo-proprietarian and post colonial societies. 

PUP Day 4

Read till Page 47 and finished the introduction.
The subtopics were rethinking justice in Ownership, Education and Immigration. He talks about how party bases shifted, civil rights movement, elitism in education and how immigration is a relatively new phenomenon.
Large scale social organisation is never simple and criticism of an existing regime is never enough to ensure that something better will replace it. When we consider big history in terms of social organisation, the temporal distance allows us some objectivity.
On complementarity of natural language and mathematical language, he has a valid point about the need of "natural" language in discussing these matters and using statistics as a powerful tool with recognised limitations.
The final section details the organisation of the book.

Part 1
Inequality Regimes in History

Chapter 1
Ternary Societies: Trifunctional Inequality

Forgot to publish this. Will put the ideas from Chapter 1 as a separate blog.

PUP Day 3

Well, actually bulk of reading was done yesterday evening. But notes weren't taken.
 Pages 20-30

Return to Inequality is the major theme. The chart showing the proportion of national income that is shared by the top decile of the population was revealing. India it is about 55% and greater than China.  Europe, USA and Russia are also compared.This proportion has sharply risen from 1980s to 2018. At the other end, the proportion of national income shared by the lower 50% has fallen to as low as 10%. Huge disparity exists in Middle East and South Africa.
The Elephant Curve which shows the distribution of income among the population is brilliant. The trunk is the sharply rising 27% of the growth owned by the top 1% of the population. The slightly rising mount of the head is the 12% growth captured by 10-40%.The dip in the trunk is the middle class (45-90 )which got hollowed out in the growth sharing. This is what Susskind also points out in the End of Work. He attributes it to automation and machinations coming up rapidly into the relatively high paying tasks. The Russian oligarch, Wealthy American, Indian industrialists etc disproportionately benefitted.

Justifications arise for entrepreneurs but not for oligarchs and oil billionaires. Justifications bring in property rights, inefficient state compared to private enterprise etc which have time and again been used to justify the inequality. Would billionaires have benefitted without the public money in education, research, legal system and tax codes? Inequality is also justified as necessary for political stability. Surely we should reward individual effort, enterprising and risk taking but reducing the share of growth of top 1% by 10-20% to benefit the middle and lower strata, would not be damaging to the top 1% in any way.

Picketty defines trifunctional or ternary societies as those that can be seen to have broadly three divisions: clergy, nobility and third estate i.e. religious, warrior/ruling/owning, common man/labor.

Page 30-40

Managed to cover this also as the topics were interesting.
The basic argument is that while in early 20th century, the class difference along any of axes of education, income, wealth was correlated. Now, that has disappeared. So the political parties are being preferred by different groups of people. Egalitarian ideologies strongly evolved across nations during the beginning of last century since the threat of communism was visible. Progressive taxation as high as 80% existed and this was frowned upon only in the 1980s when Regan and Thatcher came along. They argued that Sweden Japan etc got ahead because the progressive tax had ruined innovative and entrepreneurial spirit. But we have no evidence that cutting those taxes led to productivity.
Education system is highly unequal. In US, the bottom 10% income parents have only 20% chance of their child making it to university while it is 90% when it comes to the top decile.
The pivot in the 1980s...led to the crash in 2010 and now it is time to rethink capitalism with free market combination.
Even in a socially progressive highly educated society like Kerala, divine justification for inequality still has traction as is evident from the reactions to the Padmanabhaswamy Temple ruling by the Supreme Court.
Educated/Intellectual class, Wealthy/Managerial Class and Labor seem to be the new social divisions which kind of mirror the religious, royal and commoner categories. 

Picking Up Piketty (PUP) Day 2

I have over enthusiastically returned to the book on Sunday morning 6 am itself. Let's see how the reading goes :-)
Took 40 minutes to read....will put down the blog in another 20 minutes later in the day.

Pages 10-20

Piketty discusses collective learning and social sciences. Each group has its own history and therefore its own learning style and basis. It is easy for the social scientist to show the complexity involved in any of the studies and therefore not take a stance. Piketty says he will take a stand and provide justifications. After all aim of the book is to evolve an ideology towards more equality.
He states that progress has definitely been there if we look at life expectancy which implies health and literacy levels. Both has skyrocketed in the last three centuries. Global population as well as output have increased. However, using averages of life length, infant mortality and literacy are misleading since inequality has also drastically increased.

There have been revolutions and violent events that meant to reset the inequality and then new ideologies were created to justify the new inequalities.

In his previous book, he was too reliant on the Western rich world data, but now he has access to more data from India, Brazil and Africa, so his comparative studies have improved. He cites literature from different eras to be great pointers to the social inequality. Remember that his argument is that inequality is neither economic not technological, but that its political and ideological.
Best quote: Economics and History are too important to be left to economists and historians. Citizens should gather more knowledge in these spheres to make informed opinions and participate in the society. 

Picking Up Piketty! (Day 1)

This is an attempt to read Thomas Piketty's Capital & Ideology!
Rather Hefty tome running into 1050 pages.
Being a Math whiz, I am going to argue that it will take me about 4 months including skipped days to finish it at the rate of 10 pages per day. Today is July 18, 2020. Incredibly I am coming back to this space after the last blog entry on July 21, 2012 when the blog for June 20 was entered. A eight year hiatus!!!
The blogging is for the social commitment element of the reading habit formation...
A handful of friends will be made aware. They can frown when I slack!
Getting into some quick calculations: 10 pages probably needs around 20-25 minutes to read on an average. Followed by notes consolidation, thoughts and blogging of another 15 minutes...so should be keeping aside 45 minutes a day.
Aiming to finish by November...let's get started! An interesting time to start as it is the Malayalam month of Karkidakam on which daily reading of the Ramayana is undertaken.

Day 1
Tough start. My time estimates were utterly wrong. The ideas are complex and the style is not easily flowing, so it took me around 40 minutes to complete 10 pages. It will get faster during pages with graphs and tables...But I guess one hour is a more realistic time estimate for the daily 10 pages.
Will take a break now and return to the page to consolidate the notes!

From the first 10 pages:

Every society invents a discourse to justify its inequality.
Inequality persists in the property regime and political regime.
Current narrative of property ownership, free market, meritocracy and entrepreneurship is weak. Identity politics is rising in response.
Revolutionary mass movements have only illusory internal coherence.
Equality and education alone have helped in the development and progress.
I wonder why he doesn't country universal schooling as an exploitative institution as Ivan Illich correctly pointed out in Deschooling Society.
"The subject of this book is the history and evolution of the inequality regimes."
A new participatory socialism for 21st century is outlines.
Ideology is defined in a positive sense as a set of a priori ideas and discourses describing how society should be structured.
"The reason for this failure (easy ethno-religious and national cleavages of the disadvantaged) is the lack of an ideology capable of persuading them that what unites them is more important than what divides them"
"Inequality is neither economic nor technological; it is ideological & political."
In contrast to Marxism that seeks to give primacy to economic superstructure to society based on productivity, "it is the realm of ideas, the political-ideological sphere, that is truly autonomous."
Facts are largely products of institutions. Societies create social, fiscal, and legal categories to describe, measure and transform themselves. To appreciate facts properly we must understand their context, which consists of complex, overlapping, self interested intersections between the observational apparatus and the society under study.